The 13th meeting of the Plants Committee and the 19th meeting of the Animals Committee of CITES were held from 12 to 15 and from 18 to 21 August 2003 respectively, in Geneva, Switzerland. As they were the first meetings of these Committees after the 12th meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Santiago, they may be considered as transitional or preparatory for the work to be done in view of the 13th CoP meeting. CoP 13 will take place in Bangkok, Thailand, from 2 to 14 October 2004, as formally announced by the CITES Secretariat in its Notification to the Parties No. 2003/046 dated 15 August 2003.

As all documents to be submitted for consideration at CoP13 will have to be communicated to the Secretariat by 5 May 2004, needless to say that the time available to the Committees to achieve their work will be extremely short. The Committees will have only one more meeting to finalize the numerous documents they are directed to prepare by Resolutions and Decisions of the Conference of the Parties.

This lack of time was repeatedly underlined by many people and though several Parties expressed concern to the Secretariat, none did it strongly enough to engage it to even envisage that it would be convenient to postpone CoP13 for a few months.

One of the main items for consideration by both Committees was the review of the criteria for amendment of Appendices I and II of the Convention. The difficult discussions expected did not occur, thanks to the preparatory work of the Chairman of the Plants Committee, which was essentially endorsed first by her Committee and then by the Animals Committee. In view of the short time available until the date of submission of a draft resolution, it was proposed, and accepted, to inverse the tasks of the Committees. Instead of trying to finalize the drafting of criteria and to assess their applicability to an array of taxa, as directed by the Conference of the Parties and confirmed by the Standing Committee, both Committees established a list of species to be assessed against the criteria, as partially changed by the Criteria Working Group at CoP12, to determine where the criteria might appear as not being applicable. The review of these species should be conducted until the end of next October and their results, as well as recommendations for changing the criteria, should be sent by the same date to the Chairmen of the Committees. After consultation of the Parties, a draft resolution should be submitted to the Standing Committee for consideration at its March 2004 meeting and then to the Conference of the Parties by 5 May. This appeared to be the only way to cope with the deadlines but this does not mean that the Conference of the Parties will be able to find a two-thirds majority to adopt revised criteria.

Both Committees considered many other issues and a number of working groups were established to examine them in depth. Several of these working groups will continue their work intersessionally, with the hope that draft resolutions or decisions could be prepared at the next meetings for CoP13. The Plants Committee decided to meet in Namibia in February 2004 but the Animals Committee has not yet agreed on the time and venue of its meeting, as Namibia is not in a position to host both meetings.

In the meeting of the Plants Committee, an interesting discussion took place about the devil's claw (Harpagophytum spp.), a genus, not listed in the CITES Appendices, important for its medicinal properties and as a source of revenue for very poor populations of southern Africa. The Committee agreed that the actions taken pursuant to decisions of CoP12 were a model example of how range States, regional representatives and consumer countries could work together to provide recommendations on how to exploit a wild resource sustainably. However, the Committee also noted that the last sentence of the paragraph on the devil's claw, in a press release issued by the Secretariat prior to the meeting, was misleading (it referred to over-exploitation) and recommended its removal (obviously too late).

It is worth noting also that in parallel with each of the meetings, the Nomenclature Committee held a session on plant and animal issues, respectively. Regarding plants, there was unanimity to express concerns about the contents of Resolution Conf.12.11 on Standard nomenclature, while the discussions were rather harsh about animals, with the zoologist of the Committee and the representatives of the Secretariat rejecting most critics. Some action from the Parties is expected before CoP13.

In general however, the discussions did not generate severe exchanges of controversial views and were well conducted by their respective Chairman, not necessarily an easy task, especially for the new Chairman of the Animals Committee. Both meetings were concluded by interesting excursions organized by the Swiss Ministry for Foreign Affairs to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the signature of CITES. This afforded excellent opportunities to strengthen contacts between individuals and to favour exchanges of views on various issues, not necessarily related to CITES.